Why two escorts cannot legally share a flat

4 August 2026

The safest arrangement available to an independent escort is also the one most likely to meet the legal definition of brothel-keeping. Parliament was told about this ten years ago.

Every piece of safety guidance written for sex workers arrives at the same conclusion: working alone is the riskiest arrangement. Two people in a building, one of whom knows where the other is and when she or he is due to finish, removes most of the exposure that makes the work dangerous.

In England and Wales, that arrangement may be a criminal offence.

What the statute says

Section 33 of the Sexual Offences Act 1956 makes it an offence to keep a brothel, or to manage or assist in the management of one. Section 33A, inserted by the Sexual Offences Act 2003, covers a brothel to which people resort for practices involving prostitution and carries up to seven years on indictment. Sections 34 to 36 catch landlords, tenants and occupiers who permit it.

There is no statutory definition of a brothel. The test applied in practice, drawn from Stevens v Christy and set out in CPS legal guidance, is that it is likely to require two or more people occupying the same premises at the same time for the purposes of prostitution. Nothing in that test contains an exception for safety, and nothing in it requires anyone to be exploiting anyone else.

Parliament was told

The House of Commons Home Affairs Committee reported on prostitution in June 2016. It found that the brothel-keeping law means that some sex workers are often too afraid of prosecution to work together at the same premises and as a result often compromise their safety and put themselves at considerable risk by working alone.

It recommended that the provisions be changed to allow sex workers to share premises while retaining the ability to prosecute those using brothels to control or exploit. Ten years on, the recommendation has not been implemented and the law is as it was.

Prosecution is a separate question

CPS guidance is unusually explicit that the public interest test will often not be met. It states that maintaining a premises at which prostitution occurs is unlikely, without more e.g. a recruiting role, or anti-social behaviour, to require a prosecution in the public interest, and separately that a person selling sex who plays only a minor role in maintaining such a premises is less likely to require prosecution.

That is a meaningful protection and it is not the same as legality. A charging decision is a decision, and it is made after the involvement of the police rather than instead of it.

What this means in practice

Anyone considering an incall arrangement with another escort should take legal advice on their own circumstances rather than relying on a general account. What can be said without qualification is that the arrangement is not automatically lawful because it is sensible, that the absence of any exploitation does not put it outside the section, and that outcall work avoids the question entirely, which is a large part of why the male escort market in Britain is almost wholly outcall.